I am Dutch private pilot, licensed also in the U.S. As you may have noticed, I am particular interested in the history of Dutch airlines in the period from 1919-1940.

See some exiting private flights:

Landing in the Florida Everglades, one of the shortest runways in the world:

Difficult landing at Rotterdam airport due to sudden bad weather and visiblity:

Beautiful landing at Key West:

Why am I exited about this period?
Imagion: you are a young, but experienced pilot. You have about 500kg of post and perhaps 1 or 2 passengers.

And of course you have one of the finest aircraft's of that time: a three-engine Fokker FVIIb 3M.

And there you go, via Paris and Marseille, Egypt, the deserts of Persia, Karachi, Calcutta, Bangkok, Singapore and finally heading to Batavia. In fourteen days, perhaps faster depending from weatherconditions. Without any modern navigation-aids.

You face mousson-rains, desertstorms, drowned airfields. You sleep in a different country and culture every night, entertaining your (few) passengers also (and mostly build up friendship with them for years.

These adventures lasted for only a few years: later in the thirties planes got faster, airfields were better, navigation was easier.

As the 1930s drew to a close, the era of the 'great flights', the most romantic period in Dutch avation history, came to an end.

Aviation had matured and mankind had broken many barriers by air.

Flights across the Channel, to the Far East and the North Pole, over mountains, deserts and oceans had all been undertaken within a period spanning little more than thirty years

KLM and its aircraft were among the heroes of this pioneering age

Pioneering came definitely to an end after WWII, when the oldest airliner KLM got bigger and bigger, finally growing to one of the major airline-companies.